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Contemplating a model of New York City

competition won’t find out what they’re doing and how, but that seldom stands up to inspection. The competitor usually knows all about the business across town. As a matter of fact, the plant manager used to work for Acme and one member of the Board of Directors of Allied is a former vice president of Acme.

The average business keeps its operation a deep, dark secret mostly out of habit. If the secret is not dark, at least that’s the impression they give the American public. It is Mike Wallace standing in front of the locked gates saying, “They refused to talk to us.” It suggests there is something evil going on in there, and nine times out of ten there is not. The average businessman in America takes as much pleasure and pride from making a good product as he does from the money, but you’d never guess it from the public image he projects.

You could take the books and the production plans of any good company in America and print them on page one of the local newspaper, and it wouldn’t alter the operation one bit. That includes printing the salary of every maintenance man and executive in the place. Business is simply too secretive about everything. They don’t have anything more to hide than the rest of us.

The corporate public relations people who do the best job for their company are the ones who lay it on the line. They tell you the truth, even if it hurts a little. The ones who do their companies the most damage are those who try to hide little mistakes or keep information secret that would be better made public even when there is no law demanding it.

The American public is as suspicious of Big Business as it is of Big Government, and what I’d like to say to my old friend Bud is, business would do itself a favor and get better reporting in newspapers and on television if it opened up. If the company is making a good product for an honest profit, the truth won’t hurt it.

On Work and Money

Procrastination

I t isn’t working that’s so hard, it’s getting ready to work.

It isn’t being up we all dislike in the morning, it’s getting up. Once I get started at almost any job, I’m happy. I can plug away at

any dull job for hours and get some satisfaction from doing it. The trou

Procrastination 119

ble is that sometimes I’ll put off doing that job for months because it’s so tough to get started.

It doesn’t seem to matter what the job is. For me it can be getting at writing, getting at mowing the lawn, getting at cleaning out the trunk of the car, making a piece of furniture or putting up a shed. It’s a good thing I wasn’t hired to build the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d never have figured out where to put that first piece of steel to make it possible to get across all that water.

There is some complex thing going on in our brains that keeps us from getting started on a job. No matter how often we do something, we always forget how long it took us to do it last time and how hard it was. Even though we forget in our conscious mind, there is some subconscious part of the brain that remembers. This is what keeps us from getting at things. We may not know but our subconscious knows that the job is going to be harder than we think. It tries to keep us from rushing into it in a hurry.

There is a war going on between different elements of our brain. If I consciously remembered how difficult something was the last time I did it, I’d never do it again. The wonderful thing about memory is that it’s just great at forgetting. Every Friday afternoon in summer I drive 150 miles to our summer house in the country. I always look forward to being there and I always forget how much I hate getting there. My subconscious remembers. It keeps me fiddling around the office Friday afternoons, putting off leaving. The drive can take anywhere from three to four hours, depending on the traffic, and I hate it so much that sometimes I spend two of those four hours contemplating selling the place.

The following Friday, I can’t wait to leave the office for the country again but my subconscious puts it off.